JENKINS: Odd candor as judge puts brakes on SANDAG

The giant — or, as the judge might say, Brobdingnagian — story is this:

SANDAG, the regional agency that plans and funds major transportation projects, spent time (thousands of hours) and money (millions of dollars) devising a 40-year “regional transportation plan,” the first such sweeping effort under California’s new, but untested, greenhouse gas legislation.

A coalition of “petitioners” — environmental activists (eco-warrior Duncan McFetridge’s backcountry group and the Sierra Club), low-income housing advocates, the late-arriving state attorney general — joined briefcases to sue, arguing that SANDAG’s $200 billion building orders failed to negotiate the Byzantine twists and turns of the landmark legislation coupled with former Gov. Schwarzenegger’s tough executive order.

In siding with the petitioners, and thus beaching SANDAG for the time being, Judge Timothy Taylor tossed off some fascinating remarks. He strongly implied in his written ruling that his dramatic action is historically irrelevant, technically — but necessarily — unfair, and distorted by institutional poverty. Not your everyday admissions from someone who wears robes and sits on a bench.

Let’s take those three weirdly frank admissions in order:

• His courtroom, Taylor writes, “is but a way station in the life of this case, which is clearly headed for appellate review regardless of the outcome at the trial level.”

And later: “The case arises against a backdrop of intense scientific and political debate over what one counsel referred to as the signal issue of our time: global climate change.”

In other words, the stakes are too large, the implications too world-changing, for a Superior Court at the bottom of the gravitas chain to decide. This SANDAG ruling is written on sand — and the tide is rising.

• Considering the urgency, all the salient facts — notably, a late surge of amicus briefs on behalf of SANDAG — could not be considered, Taylor confesses.

“The court is aware of its limited role here: to ensure a complete record and to provide the parties with a timely decision so that the case may proceed promptly to appellate review.”

Because the overriding concern is to get this complex legal morass, which no single human being could truly understand, into the “learned opinion” of an appellate court, the amicus briefs were barred.

But don’t worry, Taylor counters. All that unread verbiage won’t go to waste. Somebody will read it when there’s more time.

• To further justify his refusal to consider SANDAG-friendly briefs, Taylor cited the court’s threadbare circumstances: “Brobdingnagian budget cuts recently suffered by the judicial branch have caused the San Diego Superior Court to lay off hundreds of staff, stop providing court reporters in civil cases, restrict office hours, and, most recently, close a countywide total of seven civil independent calendar courtrooms …

“These harsh fiscal and workload realities,” the judge continues, made a thorough airing of the case problematic but, as he stresses, that’s OK because his courtroom is a mere conduit. The quicker the case slides through, the better.

In another unusual riff, Taylor emphasizes SANDAG’s extra-special responsibility to curtail climate change because of the region’s “setting in which hundreds of thousands of people in the communities served by SANDAG live in low-lying areas near the coast, and are thus susceptible to rising sea levels associated with global climate change.”

By that reasoning, however, a transportation plan in, say, Riverside would bear less of a burden because none of its constituents live near the ocean. (At least not yet.)

In his summation, after kicking SANDAG in the face, Taylor returns to those vexing amicus briefs and speculates that they would have argued that the state’s zealous regulatory environment “will retard growth, harm California’s efforts to attract jobs and create economic activity, and slow down the state’s recovery from the recession. All of this may very well be true, but these are arguments properly presented to the political branches of government.”

So where does that leave us?

SANDAG came up with a sweeping plan that the overwhelming majority of the county’s cities supports. It passed muster with agencies like the California Air Resources Board, Caltrans, the U.S. Department of Transportation.

But now, thanks to Taylor, SANDAG must suck up to the victorious petitioners to see whether some compromise can be worked out, possibly a timetable for highway and mass-transit construction based more on environmental ideology, less on the practical realities in planning and funding streams.

Failing that unlikely, though desirable, Hail Mary, which Judge Taylor does not believe will be completed, SANDAG will appeal and the four-decade plan will go up the ladder, probably to the state Supreme Court, an ascent that will take years and cost more millions.

It’s hard not to long for the freewheeling days of engineering giants like Jacob Dekema who drew lines on maps and, lo and behold, freeways appeared. (And, of course, so did smog.)

More and more, poor SANDAG seems like a well-meaning Gulliver, trying to move but rendered powerless by Lilliputians with legal briefs.